Sunday, November 1, 2015

Wisdom of The Voice buried in news clips

Frank Sinatra at Gary Memorial Auditorium, Nov. 1, 1945

     Who knew? Frank Sinatra, who my generation looked at as an old school brawler, was the Sinead O'Connor of his day, an artist who put it on the line for his political beliefs.
    Ever since I've learned about this incident, almost 20 years ago, it has interested me, particularly his moving speech to the students. I thought it was my own private knowledge, and was pleased to hear this report by Yolanda Perdomo about it on WBEZ Friday, and realize other people knew about it too. 
     There's a lot more to this story than appears in either of our explorations. It touches upon labor, race and celebrity, and I am planning to turn it into my next book. I've gone to Gary a number of times to sift through the Froebel archives at the Indiana University, and am beginning to seek out people who were either there or, even better since memories fade, have letters or journals from that time. Anyone who has any leads is invited to contact me at

   Like Boy Scouts, newspapers try to be prepared. One reason the coverage of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's funeral was so extensive was that the cardinal—considerate to the end—gave the media so much advance notice.
     So when a rumor came out of California a few weeks back that Frank Sinatra was at death's door, the gears began to turn at every newspaper and TV station in the country.
     For me, that meant sitting down with a half-foot stack of beige envelopes stuffed with old newspaper clippings about Sinatra and searching for material to put into his obituary. Most everything in the clips corresponded exactly with my preconceptions about Sinatra.  Judging by what got into the newspapers over the last 50 years, you'd think he was a man famous for brawling with casino managers and dating starlets and, as a sideline, also sang.
     Reports of Sinatra's impending demise—to paraphrase Twain—were premature. The preparations were set aside.
    But one aspect of the man found hidden in his yellowed and crumbling newspaper clips just shocked me. Since it will no doubt be reduced to a sentence, if not completely overlooked, in the rush to summarize his life once the inevitable does occur, I thought I would address it here, just because it resonates so much with our world today. 
     As a young man, Sinatra was passionate about one issue: race. In our telegraphic view of history, we slap the civil rights movement into the '50s and '60s, but of course it goes back far earlier than that. In the 1940s there were huge conflicts over integration, particularly in schools and Sinatra chose to insert himself into the middle of the battle addressing groups of students as he criss-crossed the country on tour.  
     One such talk occurred in the Chicago area.
     In mid-September, 1945, a fight at a football game prompted 500 white students at Froebel High School in Gary to walk out for two weeks, demanding that blacks, who made up 36 percent of the school, be segregated to their own classrooms. 
     The strike ended with vague promises of "improvement," but a month later the students were out again, in larger numbers—600 this time—claiming their principal was "favoring" the black students and demanding they be removed from the school.
     Sinatra, at the invitation of a "tolerance group," flew in from New York and spoke at an emotional meeting of 5,000 teens and their parents in the Gary Memorial Auditorium. 
     First he sang a couple of songs. Then, clutching the microphone, he gave an extemporaneous speech. Sinatra may be famous for "Summer Wind," but the Gary talk was one of the finest things he ever did.
     "You should be proud of Gary," he began. "But you can't stay proud pulling this sort of strike—taking the remarks and advice of outsiders, people meddling, people dictating to you."
     Sinatra was referring to rumors that the Indiana Ku Klux Klan was behind the strike.
     "Their aim," he continued, "is to divide and conquer you. If you stick together, they can't do it. Why should you have two groups fighting each other, anyway? You don't know what you're missing, not being friends, playing together, visiting each other's families, sticking up for each other. Other kids in other centers don't have things like you have. Educational advantages, especially. You're throwing them away."
     He said believing other races to be inferior was a pillar of Nazism.
     "Don't let it happen here," he pleaded. "I implore you to return to school. This is a bad deal, kids. It's not good for you, and it's not good for the city of Gary, which has done so much to help with the war for freedom the world over."
     He ended on a personal note.
    "I know something about this business of racial intolerance," he said. "At 11, I was called a 'dirty guinea' back home in New Jersey. We've all done that sort of thing. We've all used the words Nigger or Kike or Mick or Pollack or Dag. Cut it out, kids. Go back to school. You've got to go back, because you don't want to be ashamed of your student body, your city, your country.
    "This is 1945, and it's time we began to live together like civilized people."
    How the strike turned out was not, of course, in Sinatra's clips. The Gary Board of Education had no idea, and suggested I try the Gary public library. Then I realized the answer had to be closer at hand.
    In the newspaper library I found an enveloped marked "GARY, INDIANA—SCHOOLS—RACIAL DISTURBANCES."
     Sinatra's wise words didn't end the Froebel school strike. That sort of thing only happens in the movies. The kids stay out 10 more days, and the problem of intolerance lasted much longer, festering and mutating into the current mess we cope with every day.
     Why couldn't those kids have just listened to Frank? Well, at least give him credit for trying. It's more than most entertainers do nowadays.
     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 24, 1996      


  1. Very interesting, indeed. So your next book might be about little known good deeds that famous people did?

    He was before my time and I was never a fan, but I do know he was protective of his pal Sammy Davis, Jr. Even my folks didn't care for him. But it's surprising that a New Jersey guy from that era would care about race. Guess he's not always the jerk he was made out to be.

    It's a good thing you do a lot of research.

    1. No, it's really about the strike. The fact that Sinatra shows up in the middle of it is just an indication of what a big story it was. Carl Sandburg and Eleanor Roosevelt also stopped by.

    2. E. Roosevelt was a great lady indeed, who cared for the less fortunate.

    3. Sinatra was overrated and should have retired sooner. Dean Martin actually had a better voice.

  2. Another thing most people don't know about Sinatra was that he was a craftsman who practiced for perfection. An actress who lived next door to Frank in a Hollywood apartment complex related that he drove her crazy, singing the same phrase over and over for hours.


    1. There were similar stories about Benny Goodman, who was known to break off a conversation in mid sentence to seek out his clarinet and try out a riff that had just occurred to him. Already a fabulous jazz virtuoso, he reinvented his technique, going so far as to have the callouses on his fingers removed, in order to master classical works he became interested in performing. The jazz and swing age, before popular music became the province of teen agers playing five chords on a guitar and prancing about a stage while shouting banal lyrics into a microphone, was full of virtuoso instrumentalists and gifted singers. Also, Goodman gave many black musicians their start, and popular music in those days became more racially integrated than was the norm for American society. Sinatra was obviously influenced by having worked in that milieu

      Tom Evans.

    2. Beg to differ with you, Mr. Evans. Good, classic rock music isn't just about banal music and 5 chords. Go ahead and see if you can play guitar like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin could. That's just one example. Try not to sound like too much of an old goat. As with big band music, there were good musicians and some average one. Same with the songs. Not every one was Glenn MIller.

    3. What LMF said. I respect Tom's opinion, but good Rock can stir the soul and create the passion to drive serious changes in our society.

    4. I'm sure you're right that there are many fine musicians working in rock and roll, but I persist in believing that the type of showmanship employed tends to obscure, and perhaps devalue, the virtuosity that we so admired when I was a young goat. I do readily concede being out of touch. And will take Stan's word for it that it has made the world a better place.


  3. Nitpick: the school you are going to is Indiana University, not the "University of Indiana."

  4. What a complicated personality he was. From tough guy to perfect gentleman, he was always a humanitarian. Off topic: He used material from the best composers, arrangers and musicians. Real strings, real horns and during most of his career everybody on the record was working in the same room at the same time.

    Doug D.

  5. Too bad he was so cruel to his son.

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  7. During the war, as in WWII, it was either Bing (Crosby) or Frank (Sinatra). Just like the Beatles versus the Stones twenty years later. My mother swooned over Perry Como right into her late thirties, but my old man always dug Sinatra, so I literally grew up with The Voice in my house--on the radio, on TV, on the many LPs we had. And his love of all things Frank was passed down to his son. I have the albums, the tapes, the posters, and the books. Some were his...most were mine.

    So I did know about the Gary strike, and the attempt at ending it. But during that same year (1945), Sinatra also received a special award for "The House I Live In", a ten-minute RKO movie short promoting racial and religious tolerance--from which came the song by the same name. The lyrics are quite inspiring--and frank--not the usual Frank.

    Having ever-so-briefly worked for the same outfit, I've seen those clips, Mr. S. And back in the day, there were shelves crammed with manila folders full of photos of Sinatra and all the things he had been involved in, both the good and the not-so-good. The staff later "automated" much of the library out of existence and much of those images probably ended up in the trash. That was an atrocity. I wish I could have been around long enough to have saved even a few of them.

    One of the librarians told me that had Frank Sinatra died suddenly--let's say at 52 instead of at 82--the Sun-Times (and the old Daily News) had enough archived material available to print a same-day extra edition of 62 pages. Why 62...and not 60...or a mystery to me. But they were quite prepared for Frank Sinatra's final act--"buying the Big Casino." Which I later found out--first-hand--when Elvis left the building.

  8. Oops...make that 62, not 52, as it was in 1978. Big math mistake there. And that "special award" was not just from some politicians or civil rights advocates, but from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself--the Oscar people. That doesn't happen very often.

    It wasn't a full-fledged Academy Award, but close enough. Frank had to wait almost another decade, and almost fade into obscurity, before he finally earned one of those statues.

